Video: Drawing spline curves with Round Corners

In this exercise, I'm going to show you how to round off the corners in this canoe to create a more organic shape inside of our illustration using the Round Corners function, and what that's going to do is it's going to allow us to take advantage of a drawing model that is not normally available to us inside of Illustrator, and that's the Spline Curve model. All right. So having set that up in a way that you can't possibly understand quite yet, you will. I would like you to go ahead and make sure you have a straight-sided version of your canoe up and running here. And if you want to join me inside of this progress document, it's called Straight-sided canoe.ai found inside the 09_pen_tool folder.

Adobe Illustrator has long been a popular vector–based drawing program, but for many the learning curve is steep. In Illustrator CS4 One-on-One: Fundamentals, author and leading industry expert Deke McClelland shows users how to get in to the Illustrator mindset and overcome this learning curve. He covers the application's key features in a new way, making it simple and easy to master Illustrator. Deke teaches viewers how to use the core drawing and shape tools, the transformation and reshaping features, text, and the Pen tool. He also explains how to export and print. Even if learning Illustrator has been a struggle in the past, this training can help make sense of it. Exercise files accompany the course.

Drawing spline curves with Round Corners

In this exercise, I'm going to show you how to round off the corners in thiscanoe to create a more organic shape inside of our illustration using the RoundCorners function, and what that's going to do is it's going to allow us to takeadvantage of a drawing model that is not normally available to us inside ofIllustrator, and that's the Spline Curve model.All right. So having set that up in a way that you can't possibly understandquite yet, you will. I would like you to go ahead and make sure you have astraight-sided version of your canoe up and running here. And if you want tojoin me inside of this progress document, it's called Straight-sided canoe.aifound inside the 09_pen_tool folder.

Just make sure that you have some portion of your path outline selected. Itdoesn't matter if you select the entire thing with the Black Arrow tool or youjust select portions of our brave warriors for example right here. These fivesticks right here are the warriors. So you can just have some of the points selected.Then I want you to go up to the Effect menu actually, you know what, let'szoom-in a little bit, so that we can see our warriors in full detail and of course regalia.I'll go the Effect menu, and I'll choose Stylize and then choose this commandright there, Round Corners. And you will get this dialog box. The Radius Valuefor me anyway is set to its default of 10 points. Now, what does that mean?Well, basically Illustrator is trying to append a quarter circle to everycorner inside of the shape, and that quarter circle has a radius of 10 points.

So that's what's going on there. Obviously, if you raise the radius value, youare going to get more curvature. If you lower the radius value, you are goingto get less. It's hard to know what to do here, unless we turn on the Preview check box.But when we turn on the Preview check box, nothing happens. Why is that? Is itthe dialog box is broken? No, actually that's not it. The reason that we arenot seeing the curvature, the roundness is because Round Corners is a liveeffect, and you cannot see live effect in the Outline Mode. You actually seethe core path in the Outline Mode. So there is no way we can see a preview,unless we go back to the Preview Mode.

So there is no sense in doing anything here except clicking OK. Just say oh,all right. Fine, get back to you. It is a live effect. So we can come back andchange it. So click OK. Then I want you to go ahead and press Ctrl+Y, Command+Yon the Mac to switch to the Preview Mode, and now you can see the curvature ofour brave warriors.We can't see the underlying tracing template of course. So why don't we just goahead and get rid of the fill. The fill happens to be active for me down hereat the bottom of the toolbox. Make sure it is for you too.Then you can just press the Slash key in order to make the fill transparent aswe are seeing it here. I'm going to go ahead and zoom-in a little bit evenmore, so that we can see what we are doing with a little more clarity.

All right. I'm going to switch over to the Appearance palette. Because, youmight think, okay, at this point, we want to change the roundness, right? Now,we can preview the roundness and now we can decide how much roundness we want to apply.So what you do? You go up to the Effect menu, and you choose this Round Cornerscommand right there or choose this Apply Round Corners or do you go down toStylize and choose this Round Corners, what in the world?Well, if you choose any of those three options there, you are going to getslapped on the hand. You are going to get this warning here that says this willapply another instance of this effect. To edit the current effect, double-clickthe name of the effect in the Appearance palette. That's why I was going forthe Appearance palette a little early right there.

You could say Don't show again. Obviously, you don't want to do this. You don'twant to create a second incarnation of the Round Corners Effect. You could sayOh! Okay, I get it. Don't show again.Do not select that check box. That's my recommendation to you. Reason beingthis is a good warning to see, because it's a constant source of confusion whenyou are working with live effects inside Illustrator.So I would just say Cancel. And duly noted, now let's go over to the Appearancepalette, there is our live effect listed right underneath the Path, showing usthat we are applying rounded corners to the entire path, not specifically to astroke or a fill for example.

Go ahead and click on Round Corners. That's all you have to do. And it's alittle live link there, so that brings up the Round Corners dialog box. Now,turn on Preview, and notice if you start reducing the value, you are going toreduce the curvature of this path as well.So you might think something like, you know 5, or 4 is looking pretty good. Andit is where the brave warriors are concerned, but it's not looking so goodalong the hole of the ship here, along the bottom of the canoe.So we really have to go with a value that's going to work for the canoe, with abig value. Because we can always make the path less curvy, as I'm going to showyou, but we can't make it more curvy than it is with round corners.

So what I'm going to suggest we do is take this value up to 14 points, and thenI'll press the Tab key to invoke that preview. And you can see now that we havea nice, smooth hole. Of course, our warriors are too smooth as well, but we'lltake care of that. So click OK in order to apply that effect.Now, we are going to take advantage of the Spline Curve Model that I wastelling you about. I'm going to Shift+ Tab away my palette, so I can see more ofmy canoe at a time, and then I'm going to grab the Pen tool right there. Whatyou can do is you can add points in order to diminish the curvature.So basically what's happening here, let me say this. Illustrator is well knownas being a Bezier Curve editing program. So it uses the Bezier Curve Model. Itdoes not use spline curves except when we are working with this Round Corners function.

Bezier Curves are much more accurate. However, they are little harder to use aswell. That's why I'm showing you spline curves to start with.A Spline Curve is just curving toward each and every one of the points. Soevery point is tugging at the curvature of this path evenly basically. So ifyou want less curvature, you have to add more points.So I'm going to click here. Don't click so near to an anchor point that you aregoing to delete it. Just click pretty near to it like so, and you will diminishthat curvature, notice that. So I'm just going to click along that tops of thewarriors heads in order to sort of clip them off a little bit, so that they areless rounded, and then we'll edit them in just a moment, and I'm going to addsome points down here at the bottom too in order to make this area a littleless curvy like so.

So you can either click above the points or to the left or right of them. It'sup to you how you want to work here. But definitely put points at all thesevarious locations. I'm not too worried about the front of the ship or the rearof the ship. I'm mostly concerned about the warriors themselves.Then now that I have set all the points in there that I need, I'm going to goahead and switch over to the Direct Selection tool, the White Arrow tool, andI'm going to start dragging my points around.Now, this guy just needs to be dragged down to add more curvature to the canoe,and notice, as you drag these points, right, you are just dragging the curveaway here. You are not actually dragging a point on the curve, which can be alittle confusing.

So if you accidentally click off the path and you deselect it, it can be alittle hard to find where that path outline is. So if you click exactly on asegment, I'm not selecting it, as you can see right here. So you need to keepan eye out for that little square that's going to tell you that's where theactual path is because the actual real path is still very angular.All right. I'm going to drag this guy down a little bit, and then I'm going tostarting on these. And you basically want them to be in sort of little cornerpositions here like so in order to get the right results out of them.

It's a little bit of work to put everybody where they need to be, but thankgolly, this isn't the most realistically rendered boat full of soldiers onearth. So you may find yourself just sort of taking some shortcuts here andthere. I want to be forgiving in our first foray into the Pen tool.So I'm just dragging these guys around, having a ball This is nice, I'menjoying myself quite a bit. Now, every once in a while it's doing this weirdthing and that's because I'm accidentally dragging the segment. So I'm gettingtwo points at a time. I need to make sure that I'm dragging on an anchor pointto move just that anchor point around.

But dragging an entire segment is an option. You can do it inside ofIllustrator if you want to. I don't want to do it there. That's terrible, andmaking a mess of this particular soldier, and he is the lead soldier.The thing though I'm thinking as I'm modifying these guys is that this guy, hehas got a lot more curvature in the underlying template that I'm giving himcredit for. And so what I might do is I might go ahead and press the P key toget my Pen tool and just click in the middle there.Nice. Notice that. That gave it a little more curvature, and then I wouldCtrl+Drag or Command+Drag that point to a different location, and I could dothat at a few points on these guys. Just adding a point, it's giving them alittle bit of pizzazz there I'm finding.

So you might try that, you might not. Completely up to you what you decide todo with these guys, just how strange and fingery you decide to make them, asone of those aesthetic choices that you and I might make completely differentlythan each other.All right. So am I done? I keep thinking I'm done. I swear to you, I did notmean to edit this path as long. This guy is looking peculiar to get him alittle more girth right there.All right. That's a nice boat full of brave warriors. There it is. That's howthe Spline Curve Model works. We're basically foreseeing the Spline Curve Modelinto Illustrator where it doesn't belong. Thanks to the Round Corners function.

In the next exercise, we are going to begin to take a look at the TrueCurvature Model inside of Illustrator, Bezier curves.

Q: Adobe Bridge CS4 is not previewing files in the same way for me as it is in the tutorial. All I am seeing is a low-quality thumbnail of the image, not previews of each artboard. Why is there a difference between the tutorial and what I am seeing?

A: There is a different view in the tutorial because the author used a beta version of Bridge during the recording. The final release of Bridge CS4 displays thumbnails as you describe.

Sorry, there are no matches for your search "" —to search again, type in another word or phrase and click search.

Learn by watching, listening, and doing, Exercise files are the same files the author uses in the course, so you can download them and follow along Premium memberships include access to all exercise files in the library.

Already a member ?

Learn by watching, listening, and doing! Exercise files are the same files the author uses in the course, so you can download them and follow along. Exercise files are available with all Premium memberships.
Learn more

Upgrade to our Annual Premium Membership today and get even more value from your lynda.com subscription:

“In a way, I feel like you are rooting for me. Like you are really invested in my experience, and want me to get as much out of these courses as possible this is the best place to start on your journey to learning new material.”— Nadine H.

Thanks for signing up.

We’ll send you a confirmation email shortly.

Sign up and receive emails about lynda.com and our online training library:

new course releases

newsletter

general communications

special notices

Here’s our privacy policy with more details about how we handle your information.

Keep up with news, tips, and latest courses with emails from lynda.com.

Sign up and receive emails about lynda.com and our online training library:

new course releases

newsletter

general communications

special notices

Here’s our privacy policy with more details about how we handle your information.